Monday, July 23, 2012

George Bartholick and how he fixed the Pike Place Market

The recent
completion of the Pike Place Market $70 million infrastructure replacement
project is now done and the market looks fit and hardy, proving that the market at 105 years,
is really the new 50.

It was all
done just in time for the start of the cruise ship season and the crowds of
tourists that come in the summer, crowds I don’t necessarily like but support
fully because they benefit the city and my many friends who work in the market and because
the place is such an American treasure we simply have to share it without too
much complaint.

The remodel
made me much more aware of the many changes in the market that somehow slide
into the place and seem old on their second day. Except the pig, the brass piggy bank at the market’s
entrance under the clock, which has been under the clock since 1986. I still feel highly Seattle when I say “meet
you under the clock” and have tried to stick to that description for many
years. The pig has changed the whole thing around and when I email “meet you
under the clock” I get a response that says “why don’t we meet at the pig?”
followed by a Smiley Face emoticon.

I
love the gum wall, something that just showed up and must drive the health
department crazy.Another is the bierstube
that Uli’s Sausages created.I went in
the other day and had a spicy Italian sandwich and a brew and felt pretty good
about where I was sitting and what I was doing.

The Pike Place Market After Its Completion
UW Collections

While
there, I asked myself if George Bartholick would have thought the place a good
idea.George was the architect and
planner we entrusted with the complete structural remaking of the market
beginning in 1974 and who completed the job six years later in 1980.It is one of the great historic preservation
jobs of its time and remains a great one today.Little
was known about how the market had been constructed or how the damage from fires and earthquakes had been repaired, if they had.Record keeping had been sloppy, plans and
documentation often absent.The original
construction was done in haste and on the cheap.

Its
reconstruction was not.The project had
a lot of surprises and all those surprises cost a lot of money.Planners in the Department of Community
Development took to calling the project “Our Vietnam.”They also worried whether the investment
would truly pay off.When the renovation
started, 80% of the market was not rented.

Seattle PI

George explained
to me once that he had essentially put a new backbone of steel running north
and south of the main market structure.To that, he added steel ribs running east to west.The buildings were attached and hung on that
basic structure.

It was a
bohemian place that he took on and he put back largely unchanged, still bohemian,
however updated, and with a backbone of steel.He often won credit for checking his considerable ego at the door and
putting the market back pretty much as it was physically.He had no control what happened to the spaces
he remade, but they seem to fit today.

Courtesy of Robin Bartholick
George is the little guy to the right of the
steering wheel

George was
able to do what he did, in part, because he was a bona fide bohemian himself.He grew up in Bellingham, the son of a shoe shop owner who liked to do things up right, like building a giant, mobile shoe that was a mainstay in the little parades that popped up around Bellingham, like the Tulalip Days Parade.

George was just the
right age to join the greatest generation’s great quest, serving as a navigator
on B-24 bombers making up the 446th Bomb Group.He guided his aircraft, the I Hope So! to Dresden the night of
February 13, 1945, the night it was destroyed, the night some of Europe’s
finest architecture collapsed into the firestorm.

446th Bomb Group
George is kneeling on camera right

Getting the airplane back was the biggest problem for the young navigators of the time, like George. After
crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, The 446th Bomb Group
deployed in England in November of 1943 and finished in April of 1945.In their first missions, beginning the last
two weeks of December, 1943, 31 crew were killed during six bombing runs over Germany, mostly
over Bremen.In January, February and
March of 1945, the war resistance on the ground was waning but the crews flew nearly
every day into seas of flak.George
would have seen the new Messerschmitt jets the Germans built and deployed late
in the war, their appearance is noted in the logs of the 446th.I knew George pretty well and he never talked
to me about this part of his life, though I certainly wish he had.

He came
back to the University of Washington, got an architecture degree there and
headed back to Europe where he worked over the next six years in Holland,
Sweden and Switzerland.He also
exercised his skill in drawing.

In 1953,
George showed up one day at the Paris home of Alex Trocchi, a Scottish writer
and one of the founders of the literary magazine Merlin, the first magazine to
publish Pablo Neruda and Samuel Beckett and frequently Henry Miller.It was highly competitive with The Paris
Review and Trocchi was among the first of the Beat Generation.

George had
drawn several panels showing Crusader soldiers and Muslim soldiers fighting
with a red cloth as their banner.At the
end of the panel, all the soldiers on each side were dead and only the red
cloth remained.It got into the magazine
along with a piece of criticism by Beckett, then almost completely unknown to
American readers.

George was
very tall, had a full head of gray hair and expansive eyebrows.I’ve never seen bigger.He frequently wore black and in the winter he
would wear a black wool cape, attached 19th century style at the
neck, over his suit.

George kept
odd hours, working most of the night and then sleeping through the morning,
arriving at the market for breakfast about one o’clock.His staff had been working since early in the
morning and would prepare materials for his review.While a supportive and kind man, George could
be picky and demanding.He wanted things
done right, but mainly he worked for the joy of it and the relationships he
found at work.

Sometimes
his staff would play tricks on George, like designing an apartment that had a
shared medicine cabinet with the unit next door, mocking a commercial for Right Guard Deoderant then receiving heavy play on televised sporting events.George would take home such plans, discover
the joke, and glow with the knowledge he had hired some fine, clever people but
who had to be watched.

He liked to
say about the market project that it was like a forester restoring a mountain
meadow, “If he does it right, no one will know that he was there.”

Western Washington University

We
entrusted George with three of western Washington’s most important
institutions.The market, of course, is
probably the most visible, but his first great project was Western Washington
State College where he was the campus planner and architect from 1963-1979 and,
with legendary state senator Barney Goltz, was largely responsible for one of
the state’s most lovely college campuses, a sculpture park long before we got one in
Seattle.As the campus architect and planner,
George always had a commission for some of the state’s best architects like Fred
Bassetti and Ibsen Nelsen, as well as for the artists they liked.A Bellingham native, George also provided the
emotional and technical energy necessary to save the old falling down City
Hall, now the amazing Whatcom County Museum.

The third
project was his most controversial and one he considered a failure, though, on
reflection, it was just the start of a process that led to a great outcome,
today’s Woodland Park Zoo.

Zoo on the left, Aurora Avenue and
Lower Woodland Park
Google Earth

A Nova
Scotian named Guy Phinney built an estate around his home at the top of the
hill overlooking Green Lake and surrounded it with 90 acres of trails,
landscaping, a band stand, a bathing beach and a few deer and other exotics,
all connected by his own, private trolley car.There already was a zoo in Seattle, privately owned, in the Leschi
neighborhood, where a trolley line, a casino, a bathing beach and a few animals
behind fences lured Seattle residents to the new real estate

opportunities
looking out over Lake Washington.

The city
annexed the Phinney property when it annexed Fremont, in 1891, and finally
bought Phinney’s estate in 1900 for $100,000, causing a fire storm of
complaints about purchasing a rich man’s private park, now known as Woodland
Park and located so far from Seattle.

When the
Olmsted brothers started work on the comprehensive parks plan in 1903, they
were delighted to include this property into their plan and added some
playfields along the Green Lake side of the park and thought it a good idea to
expand its tiny zoo with ‘hardy animals.’

After the
lots had been sold in Leschi, the developers thought to gift the animals from
their zoo to the city’s collection.Other
acquisitions followed, often through gifting.One of the largest acquisitions was Tusko, the elephant thought to be
the largest elephant in captivity.Tusko
died after creating a great drama in Seattle, being seized by Mayor John Dore
and dispatched to the Woodland Park Zoo until the city was paid for his up-keep
by the deadbeat owner who, some said, was plotting to kill Tusko and stuff him
for a museum.

Tusko in 1933
Seattle PI

While a
diversion from our story, Tusko requires some of our attention.Tusko was known to have a temper and if you had
been treated like Tusko, you’d have a temper too.By 1933, the biggest elephant in captivity
had been sold by a legitimate circus to a series of small time operators who
would show up at local events with Tusko and his size as the attraction.

Tusko was well-known in the Northwest because, eleven years
previous, the animal had gone crazy in Sedro-Woolley where he threw his trainer, took off through town where he broke up a street dance and continued on a 30 mile, two-day rampage destroying cars, a couple of barns
and many utility poles before he came upon a still outside the town in the
woods where he ate all of the fermenting sour mash and calmed down. I'm not sure about the still but the Bellingham Herald was and it remains part of the lore. Everybody knew Tusko.

Later,
while with his small time torturers were exhibiting him in Portland over
Christmas of 1931, Tusko began ripping up his tent and stood triumphant among
the debris with all but one of his tethers broken.Jack O’Grady and Sleepy Gray, who had bought
Tusko for his feed bill at the Oregon State Fair, where he had been abandoned, quickly
called police.The police chief, Leon
Jenkins, decided on the spot to shoot
Tusko and assembled several officers to do the deed.However, Portland Mayor George Baker wouldn’t
have it and ordered the police to holster their weapons.The Mayor had in mind keeping the elephant
for the Portland Zoo, but as in so many events in Tusko’s last years, it all
fell through.Tusko, the biggest
unwanted elephant in the world, soldiered on.

While in
Seattle in ’33, Tusko got the attention of another mayor, John Dore, who waded
into a controversy and a comedy of errors that left the elephant stranded in
downtown Seattle with the city feeding him.

Then Dore
heard that his owner planned to shoot the animal, stuff and sell him.That was enough for Dore. He seized the
animal for non-payment of feed and proposed taking him to the zoo, which authorities
ultimately did, closing down streets along the way and walking Tusko up to the
zoo.

Just as
they got Tusko settled and, after 80,000 visitors came to the zoo to see him, the zoo started a campaign raise the money to keep him fed
and in a decent shelter. Weeks later, Tusko laid down on his side and died of a blood clot
to his lungs.

Seattle PI

Just to the
south of the zoo the George Washington Bridge was being built, a high level
crossing of Lake Union.It was, until
1932, a kind of bridge to nowhere as citizens had Seattle’s very first freeway
fight over what they then called a ‘speedway’ through Woodland Park.The speedway would turn out to be Aurora
Avenue North and it would, save for a a trio of small and little used bridges, divide the
park into Upper Woodland and Lower Woodland after an initiative to abandon the speedway project died.

These two
events motivated George Bartholick.The
horrible treatment given animals by most zoos – sterile cages, restraints,
nothing to break the monotony of imprisonment – and the division of Woodland
Park by Aurora Avenue moved George to weave those two unrelated events into a singular
theme that George saw as the centerpiece of his zoo project.He wanted to cross Aurora with a superlative,
glass covered zoo exhibit and that would create room for expansion of the zoo into Lower
Woodland Park where animals could have more room for natural living
spaces.

Aurora Avenue
UW Collections

Rather than
solve the divisions created by Aurora, George’s plan made them sharper.The fact that this really cool idea doubled
the budget was a problem and the recreation interests, seeing a major
encroachment, organized.And a woman
named Benella Caminiti, who George could never understand because she both
worked at the Washington Primate Research Center and hated zoos, became
involved and became a powerful opponent.Passionate and tireless, Caminiti ultimately got George’s plan to the
Seattle ballot where it was defeated.The
zoo director, an interesting andcreative businessman whose own passion was a world class zoo, resigned.

George was
devastated, but as things happen, a young man named David Hancocks, who was
part of a consulting team brought in after the election, became director of the
zoo and soon created a natural space in which lowland African Gorillas could
live much more normally and still be seen closely.The exhibit was fantastic and put the zoo on
the international map.It also became the
standard for further exhibits at the zoo that respected the animals.Other exhibits followed, the African
Savannah, Asian Primates and a New England Marsh followed.Ultimately, the zoo’s exhibits won
county-wide financial support and gave it the resources to set out on another
series of terrific exhibits that mark it as one of the fine zoos in the world.

George got
to see many of the changes to the zoo and they made him less bitter about his zoo
plan.He moved on to the Pike Place Market
Project and made his great mark there and was famous everywhere for his skill
at historic preservation.

He moved
about – teaching in Mexico, fixing buildings in Mt.Zion Monument Park and finally back to
Bellingham, where he died, in 1998.

I figured
that George would have thought Uli’s place fit into the market because it was
simple and fun with no pretense.Like so
many places in the market it is a hole in the wall that shows off a fine surprise
when you enter.I also figured it would
be terrific to have George be able to see how the market fits into the plans
for the new waterfront, with a kind of cascading connection down from the top
of the hillside, where the market sits with its steel backbone, down to the
waterfront.George would have something
to say about it and would know viscerally what it might do or not do for the
market.

I thought
about another beer at Uli's but decided against it and made my way through the market, buying
peonies and early raspberries, all the time wishing that George would have made
that play on Aurora Avenue and wondering who in the future will rise up to his cause and unite Woodland Park once again.